Spotify unveils features to boost artistes’ career

Audio streaming service provider, Spotify, has unveils features and tools to help more artistes, podcasters and creators to build profitable careers, and grow their over 500 million monthly active users.

The features were unveiled recently at Spotify’s second Stream On event amid commendations by music stars, songwriters, video, content creators, and podcasters from all over the world who joined the service for a day of announcements, inspiring stories, and hands-on demos of new tools and resources coming to the global creator platform.

Spotify kicked off Stream On by doubling down on discovery, revealing a reimagined interface that leverages new visuals, and a completely new and interactive design to drive deeper and long-lasting connections between creator and listeners.

With Smart Shuffle, the platform introduced a new way to inject new music that perfectly complements an existing playlist with just the tap of a button.

Building on the success of podcast previews, creators can choose or have Spotify automatically generate previews of their music and podcasts for users to sample before they play or save.

Just like with music, Spotify will now serve Autoplay for Podcasts when a podcast ends, another episode will automatically start playing that fits the user’s tastes and is relevant.

New Concert and Merch Discovery tools will help make sure concertgoers never miss another show. Listeners will begin to see Merch offers and concert listings in far more places across the app.

Spotify is also expanding its Fans First programme to include more artistes, ensuring top listeners receive emails and notifications that give them special access to concert pre-sales and merch exclusives.

It also announced the rollout of additional podcast features, with Spotify for Podcasters, which now brings together the best of Spotify’s podcast creator tools into a one-stop shop to create, manage, grow and monetize podcast content.

Previously, Spotify’s most innovative features were limited to Anchor users exclusively. But the company is building the new Spotify for Podcasters in a way that offers more open access to innovation. As a result, all Spotify for Podcasters users, including those not hosting their content on Spotify will find access to Q&A and Poll functionality in their dashboards.

This year’s update shows that more artistes are finding success than ever before: the number of artistes generating over $1 million, as well as those generating over $10,000, has more than doubled over the past five years.

Additionally, Spotify estimates that the 50,000 highest-earning artiste on the platform generated more than $50,000 across all recorded revenue sources.

Spotify Founder, Daniel Ek said: “Stream On is about all the ways we are bringing Spotify to life and letting creators at all stages of their careers know that we are open for business. We are focused on building the best home for them, a place where they can establish a career, thrive and grow and where the world can be inspired by their creativity.”

Ek who is also the CEO of Spotify, added: “That’s what we’ve been doing for almost 17 years: building, improving and reimagining this home to better meet creator needs and help them chart new pathways to success. As we look to the future, we are excited to expand that ambition to even more creators across new formats. We’re enabling more creativity, discovery and personalization than ever before by providing the best resources, support, and interactivity.”

On his part, Spotify’s Co-President and Chief Product and Technology Officer, Gustav Söderström said: “Spotify recommendations drive close to half of all users’ streams. And when listeners decide to follow a creator, they listen to, on average, five times more of their music.”